i8o POLITICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY, 1649-58
protectorate might otherwise have expected to derive from
parliamentary approval.
When parliament met, the results were not at all in accor-
dance with the hopes of the army leaders. The majority was
willing enough to accept Cromwell's denunciation of Spain and
to vote money for the war,1 and to set up a high court to try
those plotting the protector's death—the secretary of state ex-
plaining that it was safer to try conspirators thus than by
the ordinary juries.2 On the other hand the militia bill, which
proposed to continue the decimation tax on the royalists in
order to support a militia, aroused violent opposition. A dread
of the continuance of the rule of the major-generals soon became
evident. The anti-military sentiments of the house found
powerful advocates, who deplored the tendency to divide the
state into cantons and to hand over the laws to be executed by
a power too great to be bound by any legal restraint. The
soldiers answered defiantly that it was blows, not fair words,
that must settle the peace of England, and that the quarrel was
between light and darkness. When a member spoke of indemni-
fying the major-generals for any illegalities they might have
committed, the officers boasted in reply that their swords would
indemnify them. The debate made it quite clear that members
were less afraid of a royalist rising than they were of a continuance
of the rule of the major-generals. Another point that emerged
was that Cromwell was out of sympathy with his officers.
The same hostility to military rule that was responsible for
the rejection of the militia bill caused that revision of the con-
stitution usually called the Humble Petition and Advice. The
primary objective of its framers was to change the present
arbitrary form of government for one long familiar to the
English people and restricted by usage. They therefore, in
the first clause, asked Cromwell to assume the title and dignity
of king. Thereupon the anger of the opponents of monarchy
knew no bounds. It is somewhat ironical that the army officers
who were responsible for the exclusion from parliament of the
civilian opponents of government by a single person, whether
called protector or king, should now have had to bear the
burden of the opposition to the proposal to make Cromwell
king. Lambert stated the position of his brother officers very
x See below, pp. 229-33.
2 C. H. Firth, Last Tears of the Protectorate (1909), i 43.